During the past several years
the forensic science community has developed numerous groups
and programs designed to improve the quality of forensic science
and the qualifications of forensic practitioners. Each of these
commendable efforts has produced volumes of information and documentation.

In criminal prosecutions
each defendant is entitled to certain information in order to
afford that person a fair trial. The process that provides this
information is known as discovery. It is unquestioned that defendants
are entitled to case-specific materials about forensic examinations
in his case, as well as information about the qualifications
of the forensic expert. It is as yet an open question whether
or not a defendant is entitled to non-case-specific materials
concerning various organizations such as SWGDAM and SWGMAT. The
legal process of discovery recognizes a balance between the defendant's
right to a fair trial and the specific demonstrable need for
the information.

A recent Arizona Supreme
Court decision, State v. Tankersley (Az.1998) 916 P.2d
486, involving DNA-PCR typing demonstrates this point. The defendant
sought voluminous materials in discovery that were not related
to the case-specific work. The forensic scientist declared that
it would take 500 hours to prepare the materials and that he
would have to close his lab to provide the materials. The trial
court declined to order the materials to be turned over to the
defense. The Arizona Supreme Court upheld this decision because
the defendant had not demonstrated a substantial need for the
materials and had failed to show that there was no substantial
equivalent for these materials elsewhere.

The significance of the justification
for the decision is important for forensic scientists to appreciate.
In DNA cases, in the PCR era, there is almost always evidence
remaining for defense reanalysis. A defendant would be hard-pressed
to meet the burden enunciated in Tankersley if evidence
remained for retesting. Even more important, many forensic analyses
are nondestructive on nonconsumptive. In those areas a defendant
may have the same forensic evaluation performed.

In summary, a defendant has
a right to a fair trial, not a perverse trial. Applying the rationale
of Tankersley, prosecutors should seek to limit the scope
of criminal discovery to the case-specific work done and the
qualifications of the forensic expert.

"You ought to see that
bird from here," said Rabbit. "Unless it's a fish."
"It isn't a fish, it's a bird," said Piglet.
"So it is," said Rabbit.
"Is it a starling or a blackbird?" said Pooh.
"That's the whole question," said Rabbit.

C from Winnie-the-Pooh, by A.
A. Milne

In The Ontongeny of Criminalistics,
Paul Kirk wrote more than 35 years ago that "for the most
part, progress [in forensic science] has been technical rather
than fundamental, practical rather than theoretical, transient
rather than permanent" (Kirk 1963:235). Regrettably, today,
the same statement could be made about the progress of forensic
science in the last 30-odd years. In many of the fields of science
that are applied to legal or public issues, a deficiency in the
fundamental theories and principles exists, unlike most, if not
all, other sciences. Some may argue otherwise, but as a response,
the following is offered: Why, then, if these theoretical underpinnings
are fully developed, are admissibility challenges still being
heard on such disciplines as hairs, fingerprints, and documents?
Kirk would ascribe this "what, me worry?" mentality
to the "misconception that science consists merely of an
orderly presentation of facts or methods, rather than an elucidation
of basic laws and principles" (Kirk 1963:235). Simply because
a full roster of proven methods exists does not make a science
complete. Additionally, some methods are being lost because they
are not perceived to be objective or efficient (McCrone 1999).
It is imperative that the practitioner not only know how to do
something, he must also understand why it is being done. Otherwise,
like Rabbit in A. A. Milne's books, one argues in circles using
facts without understanding.

Recently, scientific working
groups (SWGs) have stepped in to attempt to fill this theoretical
gap, as well as catalog and refine current methodologies. One
of these, the Scientific Working Group for Materials Analysis
(SWGMAT), addresses the analysis of trace evidentiary materials,
such as paint, glass, hairs, fibers, and adhesive tapes. The
approach SWGMAT has taken, in conjunction with working groups
in Europe and Australia, is to produce voluntary consensus guidelines
for analysis, training, and quality issues in the trace evidence
disciplines. The analytical guidelines (see SWGMAT 1999, for
example) are aimed at the qualified bench analyst who must have
a working knowledge of a wide variety of potential methods, their
benefits, and pitfalls. Each subgroup in SWGMAT is drafting such
analytical guidelines for the previously mentioned disciplines.
Because these guidelines are voluntary, no enforcement is necessary
or even possible by SWGMAT. Each laboratory can use all, part,
or none of the published guidelines as they see fit, on the basis
of resources, needs, and personnel. For a forensic laboratory
facing accreditation, the SWGMAT guidelines could be a very useful
reference. But supporting the current generation of bench analysts
is only part of the process.

In turn, each subgroup will
draft a training workbook, which will be a competency-based,
self-contained trace evidence laboratory training program. Each
workbook will be designed to mimic a graduate-level laboratory
course notebook. The sections will be organized into the following
headings: Introduction, Theory, Required Reading, Materials,
Exercises, Review Questions, and a Competency Checklist for the
trainee and the training manager. Thus, a new employee could
be handed the Fiber Training Workbook and, under the supervision
of the training manager, be able to complete a standardized course
of practical learning with objective criteria for successful
completion. Without a common, uniform basis, trace evidence,
as a discipline, will never achieve two of Kirk's (1963:237)
three basic criteria of professional acceptance:

A profession is based upon
an extensive period of training at a high education level, and

A profession requires established
competence.

Once the basic criteria for
competency are standardized, then the analytical guidelines fall
easily into their place in the laboratory.

SWGMAT's analytical guidelines are already
being adopted, with some changes, by the European Network of
Forensic Science Institutes' (ENFSI) working groups, starting
with the European Fibers Group (EFG). Because of differences
in equipment, funding, and legislation, SWGMAT's analytical guidelines
are being altered to fit within the framework of ENSFI's best
practice for forensic laboratories. The resulting guidelines
will retain much of what SWGMAT drafted, with notable differences.
The same will be true in time with the Australian Special Advisory
Groups (SAGs). This will leave us with a core of methods and
techniques that are recognized worldwide by all forensic laboratories
(Figure 1). As a model, this is
the first step toward a series of global standards in trace evidence
analysis. The benefits of global standardization are numerous
and include the following: refinement of methodology, uniform
practices, more efficient analyses, improvement of equipment,
increased laboratory resources, and a firmer foundation for courtroom
acceptance and interpretation.

Additionally, uniform standards improve quality
and communication and lead to more forensic laboratories that
meet accreditation standards. Rather than a top-down approachone
that only allows change to come from upper management, the dominant
paradigm since the industrial revolutionthe private sector
is altering its paradigm to a bottom-up view of change (Senge
1990). In this model, each individual is an agent for improvement,
learning, and growth. The institution engenders or cultivates
this change by educating and investing in each worker so that
they better understand and execute their duties. This feeds the
worker's knowledge and creativity back into the institution and
yields higher quality, better services, and a quality product.
So, too, with a forensic science laboratory (Figure
2). This produces a complex adaptive system that induces
constructive change within a scheme (Gell-Mann 1994). If the
education, training, and creativity of the bench analyst is stinted,
then the entire laboratory suffers. SWGMAT is working to provide
the resources to assist forensic science analysts and management
in the attainment of higher quality trace evidence analysis.

References

Gell-Mann, M. The Quark
and the Jaguar. W. H. Freeman and Company, New York, 1994.

The Forensic Science Service
(FSS) in the United Kingdom has been reviewing and developing
its services for a number of years with the aim of providing
better value for money to its customers. There is a continuing
need to make effective use of limited resources and to provide
a robust, reliable, and consistent service. How does a major
supplier of forensic science services ensure it meets these requirements?
How do individual forensic scientists make sensible decisions
when selecting items for examination and when choosing from a
battery of analytical techniques?

Working with experienced
colleagues in the FSS, a small lead team has developed a model,
on the basis of a Bayesian framework, for assessing the needs
of a case, devising a case strategy, and interpreting findings
in a logical, robust way (Cook et al. 1998a, 1998b; Cook et al.
1999; Evett et al. 1999).

This work has highlighted
and given fresh insight into the

difference between addressing
issues and answering questions,

type and level of issue
a scientist can address,

consistency in interpretation
between scientists,

use and construction of
databases,

communication with customers,
and

role of a forensic scientist.

It has helped to expose,
define, and clarify those areas in which a scientist can add
value to an investigation and to court proceedings.

Through workshops with operational
colleagues, a range of case studies is being developed to demonstrate
applications of the approach to a wide range of casework.

Scientific databases are
data collections that are acquired, organized, stored, accessed,
and disseminated to support users in their scientific endeavors
including forensic science. They can be used to search for and
visualize complex relationships among data items, to discover
patterns and knowledge in the data, and to support the scientific
discovery process.

In this presentation, a scientific
database is defined, and several examples of scientific databases
that provide access to multi-media data including text, images,
graphs, temporal, and spatial data via the World Wide Web are
provided. In addition, I review elements of object-oriented conceptual
modeling of a scientific database application domain, and I show
how that model can be used to integrate information obtained
from multiple data sources of differing degrees of data quality
and source reliability.

For the purposes of this
talk, the term trace evidence will be defined as those items
of transfer evidence whose population distributions are not genetically
controlled. Examples of materials commonly encountered as trace
evidence are manufactured items such as glass fragments, fibers,
or paint chips and natural items such as soil. Rulings in several
recent court cases have shown an interest on the part of various
judges and attorneys to place a probability measure on the statement
that two items of evidence are consistent with a single source.
This feeling, repeated by other speakers within this symposium,
is generally put forth by statisticians and biologists who are
used to dealing with evidentiary items that have distributions
of measured parameters that are governed by genetics. The purpose
of this talk is to discuss the differences between trace evidence
and the other forms of evidence presented by the next three speakers
(fingerprints, toolmarks, and biological materials), which make
it much more difficult, if not impossible, to calculate frequency-of-occurrence
statistics.

There are three possible
opinions that can be reached in comparison of a transfer item
with a possible source item, the typical trace evidence examination.
In rare instances, a positive identification can be made: A jigsaw
match of a piece of glass with a broken window is a unique occurrence.
At the other extreme, an exclusion can be made: The questioned
item is so different from the comparison source that it could
not possibly have come from that source. In between these extremes
lies the conclusion that the questioned and source item have
no significant differences that could exclude their once having
been part of a single object. The difficulty arises when the
examiner attempts to place a measure of significance on this
indistinguishability. If the number of independent comparative
parameters is increased or more discriminating comparison methods
are used and the samples remain indistinguishable, then the significance
of that indistinguishability increases. However, the conclusion
of this exam must be something like "the glass fragment
is consistent with coming from the broken window at the crime
scene, or another window that is indistinguishable in the measured
parameters." As the discrimination capability of the analytical
methods used improves, the opinion does not change (unless, of
course, there is an exclusion). What does change is that the
potential of an accidental match with another unrelated window
diminishes.

The most important factor
making trace evidence different from other forms of evidence
is that values of each measured parameter vary for subsamples
of a given object. Unlike nuclear DNA, which is invariant among
samples from a given person, fragments of glass from the same
window may not all have the same refractive index. The relative
magnitudes of the within-object variability and the variability
across objects of the same product class define the discrimination
capability of the analytical technique used to measure the parameters
in question. The heterogeneity of a source object, such as a
carpet or a broken window affects four aspects of comparison
between this source and comparison fibers or fragments: method
of comparison, sample selection, definition of analytical indistinguishability,
and data requirements.

Method of Comparison:
Selection of an appropriate
analytical method and decisions as to which parameters to measure
depends upon both the within-object and across-object variations.
The observed variability in a measured parameter for multiple
samples taken from an object is a combination of the analytical
imprecision and the true sample heterogeneity for that parameter.
Instrumental errors affecting precision and bias are important
because they can be controlled by the analyst and should be kept
low enough to measure the sample heterogeneity. Another concern
regarding trace evidence is the lack of well-characterized, appropriate
reference samples in the size ranges of evidentiary samples as
needed for preparation of analytical standards and for proficiency
testing.

Sample Selection: The variability of a potential source
object determines the number of analytical samples required for
comparison with questioned samples. Correct comparison of items
of trace evidence cannot be done with one-sample-to-one-sample
comparisons as may be appropriate for biological specimens, fingerprints,
and toolmarks. Further, the number of samples and their sources
required for a given analytical parameter may be different from
those required for another parameter.

Definition of Analytical
Indistinguishability: The
decision whether two samples are analytically distinguishable
is made on an implicit or explicit statistical basis. Simple
comparison of means can be made using well-established statistical
tests, if the distribution of the measured parameters over the
potential source object is known (or assumed). The number of
false associations and false exclusions can be limited somewhat
by judicious selection of the hypotheses being tested and the
match criteria. Trace evidence is somewhat different from other
forms of evidence in that a false positive (that is failure to
exclude a single source for two items of different source) is
not a serious error, provided the conclusion is considered in
the context of the examination performed. Rather, failure to
discriminate between two sources is a result of the limited discrimination
capability of the examination method being used. Improvements
in discrimination capability, such as by measuring additional
independent points of comparison, may limit the number of false
positive results at the risk of increasing the number of false
exclusions. For examinations involving many measurements, multivariate
methods to limit the number of false exclusions are available,
but they often require a great number of analytical samples.

Data Requirements: When discriminating analytical methods
are used, calculation of the probability of accidental matches
is not generally feasible. The amount of data required to model
probability distributions for highly discriminating multivariate
analytical methods is extremely large. Differences in the within-object
heterogeneity of a given measured parameter vary from one manufacturer
to another and from one object to another within a given manufacturer.
Therefore, conclusions made concerning one object or analytical
parameter cannot be generalized to other objects or parameters.
As a result, a great many measurements are required prior to
making a probability statement concerning the results of a particular
examination.

The second important factor
limiting attempts at making probability statements about trace
evidence is the temporal variability of manufactured products.
Changes in production, delivery, use, and disposal of manufactured
products over time effectively negate attempts at databasing
and associated probability statements. A database of measured
characteristics for a given product may be applicable only at
one point in time and at one location. Combining the time and
location changes with the large number of samples needed for
samples measured using highly discriminating analytical methods
makes it at best impractical and at worst impossible to collect
appropriate databases for making probability statements. The
most appropriate uses of databases in trace evidence examinations
are for classification of an unknown object into a product use
or manufacturer class and for testing the discrimination potential
of an analytical method.

Examiners of trace evidence
must be cognizant of the analytical requirements of comparing
small items of evidence and the constraints they place on opinions
formed. Although it is appealing to assist the trier of fact
with some numerical evaluation of the significance of an opinion
of indistinguishability, the drawbacks of the various methods
for doing this must be considered. In particular, calculation
of likelihood ratios, as discussed by Graham
Jackson, provides an excellent perspective for evaluating
the various factors that must be considered in forming an opinion
as to significance. However, for items of trace evidence, some
of these factors can be evaluated only in a qualitative sense.
Given the current state of knowledge and the spatial and temporal
variability of trace evidence, calculation of exact probability
statistics are impractical and, perhaps, impossible.